


Incentive

by xaritomene



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Artist Gerard Way, Insomnia, M/M, Poor Life Choices
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-07
Updated: 2014-03-07
Packaged: 2018-01-14 22:29:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1281121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xaritomene/pseuds/xaritomene
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gerard's sleeping habits are terrible, and Frank desperately wants a good night's sleep. Clearly, some positive reinforcement is in order.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Incentive

**Author's Note:**

> Written for bandomvalentine on lj, for the prompt: "MCR fic, shmoopy fluffy awesome frank/gerard, Cuddling and naps are awesome too!" This is about three years old, and has only had the most cursory re-reading, so I'll apologise in advance for any issues...

Frank was pretty sure he would never know where Gerard got the energy to do everything he did – the band, the comic, reality TV reviews, saving lives on the side – but he certainly knew where he got the _time_. Gerard never slept, or at least he didn’t sleep like a normal person, at night. He liked to claim that he was ‘most inspired’ at night, but Frank knew he was just a giant insomniac who fed his insomnia with coffee and cigarettes – and then he’d crash at some point during the day, if he let his blood/caffeine ratio fall too far.

It wasn’t a healthy habit, Frank conceded, but it was just how Gerard was, and after years of sharing space with him, they were mostly all just used to it.

It did help that Frank was normally pretty much OK with Gerard’s tendency to collapse on the sofa and end up asleep and drooling on Frank’s shoulder twenty minutes later. Frank usually turned the volume on the TV down two bars and let him sleep. (Frank would take most any excuse for cuddles, and Gerard’s sleeping habits were an excellent cover up.)

But weird sleeping habits on tour were par for the course; when they were off-tour and had a chance to relax, almost everyone else got back into the swing of normality and slept at normal times. Gerard never did, and it was slowly, surely driving Frank _mental_. Gerard would end up in bed (generally smearing the sheets with blue paint (“cerulean, Frank!” “Calling it that won’t make it any easier to _wash out_!”)) at three or four in the morning, would lie awake for hours, keeping Frank awake with his coffee-induced inability to stay still, and would then get up, without sleeping, at seven. And then Frank had to spend a fair chunk of the next day tiptoeing around his own home so as not to wake him.

Things had to change, or Frank was going to start drugging his coffee.

His first attempt was simple: distraction from Gerard’s usual night-time activities (painting, channel-hopping, drawing, drinking coffee) with sex, followed by the inevitable post-coital lethargy, which would clearly be followed by sleep. It was totally foolproof.

Gerard was just about to disappear into the little room at the back of the house that acted as his de-facto studio when Frank intercepted him with a grin. “So!” he said, and Gerard smiled back and played along.

“So,” he agreed easily.

“We haven’t fucked in a while,” Frank said, since really, Gerard might be a fucking genius in some areas, but if Frank tried to talk around the subject and be all coy, they’d end up chatting about it for hours and then Gerard would go off and – write fucking poetry with sex-metaphors designed to highlight the frailty of the human existence, or some shit like that. So. Directness was key.

The downside was Gerard apparently choking on his own tongue, or something, but Frank was used to working from a disadvantage. “Er – guess not,” Gerard managed finally, sounding just a little hoarse, and Frank yanked him forwards into a kiss before he could say anything else. Whatever Gerard had been about to say came out totally mangled, but by the time Frank pulled back, he seemed to have forgotten it anyway.

**

The sex was awesome, which, Frank thought smugly, really wasn’t that much of a surprise. Gerard lay there for a couple of minutes after they’d cleaned themselves up (Frank’s rule, not Gerard’s), wrapped around Frank like the octopus he always turned into after sex – but then he ruined it all by wriggling free and pressing a quick kiss to Frank’s mouth.

“That was _amazing_ ,” he said, packing every bit of his habitual sincerity into the words, “and you’re always amazing, but I just had this really great idea, and I’ve gotta get it down, y’know?”

He was out the door before Frank could so much as form a protest. Frank let his head thump back against the pillow and sighed; apparently his foolproof plan was a little less foolproof than he’d thought.

Tranqs it was, then.

**

Since the plan to trick Gerard into sleeping at a normal time through the careful application of sex hadn’t worked, Frank decided that clearly, what was needed was a little positive reinforcement. He’d lure Gerard into bed, get him to sleep – somehow, even if he had to handcuff him to the damn thing – and then reward him with... well, probably sex. If he could get Gerard to associate sleep with a kind of “adult” reward system, then he could surely alter his sleep pattern. Slowly, maybe, but it was important to keep the end result in mind.

Gerard, however, proved to be the sticking point in this plan. Frank was far too fond of the idiot to wake him up when he came across him napping at yet another inopportune moment, and was usually complicit in his bad habits, since he let Gerard nap on him whenever they were sat in front of the TV or out in the garden, or... wherever else Gerard decided was a great place to sleep that _wasn’t the bed_ \- and that inevitably left him wide awake when normal people were starting to consider going off to sleep. Not to mention, Frank hadn’t really considered just how he was going to get Gerard to sleep in the bed at a normal time in order to enact his plans of positive reinforcement. Gerard was, as always, immune to hints and suggestions and had proven himself to be strangely and worryingly immune to the post-coital lethargy, and Frank was at a loss.

He proved his own dedication to the cause (because, seriously, one decent night’s sleep, that was all he was asking at this point) by sabotaging the coffee maker, but after Gerard spent half the day grousing about it and then the rest of it drooling on the couch cushions, fast asleep, whilst Frank twitched irritably through endless re-runs of _Law and Order_ , he conceded he probably hadn’t thought that one through.

In the wake of the Coffee Maker Disaster, Frank gave up and invested in ear plugs. If he couldn’t hear Gerard moving about the house and singing to himself and crawling into bed at four in the morning only to lie there doing nothing and keeping him awake by twitching and shifting and generally being really noisy, but in a stealth kind of way, then it couldn’t bother him, and they could go back to normal. Frank could stop wondering whether sticking Gerard’s head in the tumble dryer until it stunned him was worth it just for a moment of nocturnal peace and quiet, and Gerard could stop greeting him every morning with coffee and a hangdog expression of apology. _Frank_ could stop associating sex with a futile longing for a peaceful, uninterrupted night of sleep (which was the result of the awe-inspiring backfire which was his ‘positive reinforcement’ plan).

It would be totally fine.

The morning after the best night of sleep he’d had since they got off-tour, he took his morning coffee out into their postage stamp of a back garden and sat on the step with it, blowing absently at the steam and taking in the sunshine. He offered Gerard a smile when he appeared in the doorway, shifting over to let him sit down next to him.

“Did I keep you up last night?” Gerard asked anxiously, the same way he did every morning, and Frank’s smile became a grin.

“Nah, not so much,” he said honestly, a divergence from his usual shrug and occasional bitch session about how ‘seriously, sleep is _fantastic_ , I don’t get why you don’t get that’. Gerard relaxed next to him, and leant his head on Frank’s shoulder. It had to be kind of awkward for him, since Frank was hunched over and shorter than Gerard to start with, but Frank looped an arm round his waist and kind of cuddled, just a little. “Hey, so, what’ve you been working on recently anyway?” he asked.

When he answered, Gerard’s voice was slow and a little slurred. “Dream diary,” he said succinctly.

“The fuck, dude?” Frank asked, frowning. “You don’t sleep!”

“S’the point,” Gerard agreed, a thread of earnestness trying valiantly to make itself heard in his voice. “Dream diary of an insomniac.”

“That makes – exactly no sense,” Frank said slowly, and after maybe a minute, Gerard shrugged, reactions seriously delayed. “So does this mean you’re going to sleep like a normal person now?” he asked, but there was no reply. Shifting awkwardly so he could glance down at Gerard, he grinned. Gerard was asleep, and Frank shifted his arm to hug him just a little tighter. Pretty soon they were going to have to have a serious discussion about Gerard’s stupid sleeping habits (or Frank was going to have to get used to the stupid earplugs), but for the moment, the sun was shining, the coffee-machine was working, everything was going OK and would be fine.

Even if Gerard _was_ drooling on his last clean T-shirt.


End file.
